…Attempts at Hip, Hot and Happenin’

Seems like CBC television is in need of a serious shake up. This, of course, has been true for a long time but this old public stalwart surely must now admit it as a whole slew of its new productions are cancelled in the first season. The heavily pushed Jpod and MVP among them for the simple reason that they sucked ass.

Local Vancouver scenesters immediately started whining about Jpod’s cancellation, extolling its perfection, their mindless loyalty to local industry blinding them to all notions of quality. CBC, in its consistently ill fated attempts to reach a youth market, gave these hacks their shot at the big time and predictably they produced slick, glossy piles of shit.

I love the CBC, I believe in its public mandate, I admire its old school productions like Politics, The Nature of Things, Hockey Night in Canada (in spite of Don Cherry and Ron macLean’s narcissistic Coaches Corner.) The problem it seems to have is when it decides it wants to be hip, not that being in touch with contemporary cosmopolitan culture is a bad idea, its that the CBC seems to think the best way to do this is to hire hipsters. This is a most unfortunate mistake, ruining even good ideas like Zed, destroyed by its fascistic, minority centric host, or making intolerable good show concepts like The Hour, with George Stroumboulopouhack.

These hipsters are career centric hacks whose lack of talent, artistry or intelligence seems to be made invisible to the CBC because of their stylized fashionista wardrobes and cooler then thou attitudes. These people are not the innovators or artists they pretend to be. They are egotistical followers of fads and fashion but have no true concept of culture, be it historical, mainstream or cutting edge.

Its time for CBC to install management that can look past glossy presentations and sparkling resumes to see the real artists, who often on the face or not as shiny as the too cool for school subjects of the uber hip wankerdom kingdoms that have been swallowing air time, jobs and grants money for far too long. There is precious little of these resources nowadays.

Its time Canada start putting money into where interesting things can happen. Remember Glenn Gould, Norm McLaren, SCTV, a young Cronenburg (whose first films were both shitty and revolutionary), the slew of 70’s Tax Credit films from the brilliant to the abysmal. These were back when Canadian culture had an international impact, back when we put money into things that weren’t glossy and slick but took some risks on the strange, the questionable and the unknown. Until we do that Canada will once again become a culturally inert backwater, simply one of the colonies, a bunch of dumbed down hosers sloggin’ oil, lumber, car parts and maple syrup. That’s not the Canada I want. I want a Canada that stands tall and let’s it’s voices be heard, because we can indeed change the world. We’ve done it before, we can do it again.